Charlottesville Blogs’ Traffic

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 5, 2007 in Blogs. Closed

The popularity of the Charlottesville Blogs aggregator has spiked in the past few months. Here’s a graph of monthly page views since the aggregator’s inception:

Graph

Those of y’all who blog should know that a great many more people are reading your blogs than perhaps you’ve suspected. I wish I had some more useful numbers (monthly visitors, repeat traffic, etc.), but I’m using a pretty crude program to track traffic to Charlottesville Blogs, so page views is as good as it gets.

(This was prompted by Michael Strickland’s kind post on the topic today.)

Dem Seeks County Clerk Position

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 5, 2007 in Law and Justice and Politics. Closed

Charlottesville Court deputy clerk Janet Ferrance is running for Albemarle Circuit Court Clerk, the Progress reports. She’s seeking the Democratic nomination, and it’s said that she may not be the only one to do so. Republican John Dawson has already announced his candidacy. The winner will take the place of Shelby Marshall, who is retiring after forty years.

Scottsville Man Cops to Medical Marijuana

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 5, 2007 in Law and Justice. 22 Comments

Scottsville’s Gary Peck has pleaded guilty to growing marijuana, but argues that it was for his sick wife, Liesel Nowak wrote in Tuesday’s Daily Progress. The man’s wife suffers from multiple sclerosis, which at least one study has demonstrated is helped considerably by the consumption of marijuana, leading to both short- and long-term relief of symptoms. The drug slows the death of nerve cells and protect existing nerve cells against damage, slowing the spread of the disease. Peck’s wife cited its effect on her appetite, which allows her to eat despite the nausea induced by her prescribed medications.

Peck was accused of growing $4.8M in weed, but that’s using the police’s “street value” logic, which is akin to determining the “street value” of a sack of flour by calculating how many wedding cakes it could make. The court determined $35k was a fairer value, apparently agreeing with the man’s attorney, who calculates that the haul would only yield a few pounds of smokable marijuana. Peck will be sentenced in July. He may well receive 30 years in prison.

WAHS Teacher Indicted for Student Sex

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 4, 2007 in Crime and Education. 3 Comments

Former Western Albemarle High School social studies teacher Neal Willetts has been indicted on federal charges of sexually exploiting children, Lisa Ferrari reports for CBS-19. The 26-year-old is accused of engaging in sexual acts with a total of eight students, including two at WAHS and one at Fluvanna. The most recent regional instance of similar charges came in the case of CHS’ Jonathan Spivey. Before that was Fork Union Military Academy’s Gregory Allen Moyer and, also in 2001, CHS teacher Jeffery Hutchinson.

Slutzky TDR Proposal Becomes State Law

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 1, 2007 in Development and Politics. 11 Comments

The Board of Supervisors’ Rio District representative David Slutzky proposed allowing rural landowners to sell their unused development rights to growth-area landowners back in October, with the caveat that localities aren’t currently permitted to authorize that under state law. That changed with HB2503, introduced by Del. David Toscano. Gov. Tim Kaine just signed that bill into law, Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress, meaning that the path is now clear for transferrable development rights (TDR) in Albemarle and, in fact, throughout the state. It may not matter, though, since the BoS has thus far been entirely uninterested in the proposal.

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